This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I just realized this morning there's a song I want to learn. I know a little bit of it, but after the practice period is over, and I get... back to the world where there's internet. I'll find the lyrics. I start something like, Oh, I'm the great pretender, pretending that I don't love you. Something like that. Is that how it goes? Buddha, the great pretender.

[01:10]

Would you open it up and put it just in the right spot? For those who are not seeing this visually, the great attendant Clark is now opening the great bowing cloth of Buddha made according to Buddha's own. Please have a seat here. Yesterday we considered a along with some other things, we considered a teaching given by the great ancestor Nanyue to the great ancestor Matsu.

[02:13]

And the teaching about seated Buddha. Nanyue said, if you are practicing seated Buddha, Buddha is no fixed mark. So here is just a wonderful meditation instruction for us. When we're sitting, if we are practicing seated Buddha, if that's what we're doing, the instruction is that the Buddha is no fixed mark. So we sit with no fixed mark. This teaching of sitting Buddha is no fixed mark.

[03:24]

This is a teaching which seems to be for bodhisattvas. This is a teaching for those who are devoted to the welfare of all beings. This is a teaching for those... deeply, deeply care and value and appreciate every living being. For those who are like that, they need a teaching like this so they can do their wonderful work. If you don't care much for many, this maybe isn't a good teaching for you. Seriously. I mean, you know, seriously. Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra, it's a teaching for bodhisattvas. If you don't care about people, maybe you shouldn't hear that there's no suffering, no origination, no cessation and no path, that there's no eyes or ears or nose.

[04:34]

Maybe you shouldn't hear about that if you don't really care about beings because you might say, well, I didn't care much about beings anyway, but now I find out there aren't any, so now I really don't care. somebody just said to me recently, you know, I feel like everything's like a dream. Everything's kind of hazy. I said, well, that sounds like the Diamond Sutra, which teaches to regard all beings, all phenomena, like a dream, like a mirage, like a phantom. But that's a teaching for bodhisattvas, If you look at beings as dreams before you deeply care for them, then you might say, well, I don't care for them, again, too much, or I don't care for some of them.

[05:36]

And they're dreams anyway, so what? That's not a good teaching. You should forget that teaching and try to find a way to get another teaching, a teaching for people who don't care. Or start, get a teaching to care more. And when you care more, then you can come back to this teaching. And if you're not caring much, then you should have a teaching like, have you noticed lately that you're in pain? The truth of suffering is a good teaching for people who don't care much. get them to pay attention to that teaching, they'll start to care. The truth of suffering is that you are suffering right now whether you know it or not. Bodhisattvas don't have to be told this. So, this is a teaching here, a wonderful teaching, I think, an emptiness teaching.

[06:43]

If you're studying seated Buddha, Buddha has no fixed forms. This is a wisdom teaching for bodhisattvas so that you can realize the practice and benefit all beings. If you really care for beings and you see them as dreams, you keep caring for them. If you're seeing beings as dreams erodes your care at all, you're not meditating on this teaching properly. This teaching doesn't exactly make you care more. It makes your care more balanced and steady and indestructible. It protects your care.

[07:44]

That's what the teaching is for. It's to protect your bodhisattva heart. Otherwise, we can lose it. We can lose it if we care too much or too little. If we substantiate those we're devoted to, we will have burnout. So, again, this is not... Well, I sometimes say gangsters don't have burnout, but actually, gangsters do have burnout in their families. They don't have burnout towards their... towards their clients, towards the people that they don't care about. They have burnout towards the family, which they do care about, and they substantiate. And then the burnout feeds their gangsterism. if I ever get to come to the Zendo again, I'm going to practice this.

[08:58]

I'm going to practice sitting Buddha and it's going to be no fixed form. Believe me. I've heard stories about Shakyamuni Buddha, but that ain't the practice I'm going to be doing. I'm going to be no fixed form Shakyamuni Buddha practice. I'm going to be like sitting Buddha. And those of you who are not in constant doksan can start ahead of me. Don't wait for me to come. One of my great benefactors, his name is P.S. Jaini. great scholar at University of California, Berkeley, teacher of Professor Bielfeld and others.

[10:01]

He let me come and visit him, even though I wasn't a student. He let me come and visit him and ask him questions about abhyamakosha and stuff. And he wasn't a Buddhist, but he was reading the Prajnaparamita in 8,000 lines in Sanskrit. And I came to visit him one time. He said, this is a dangerous text. He said, the Heart Sutra should be called the Heartless Sutra. It's a heartless teaching. No eyes, no ears, no tongue, no body, no mind, no sentient beings, no heart, no suffering. It's heartless. It's a heartless teaching for those great-hearted beings. It protects their heart. It's a heartless protection for the great heart. So keep an eye on these great teachings and if you find that you're losing touch with your concern for the welfare of beings, put them aside and go take care of your heart.

[11:14]

The next part that we also discussed yesterday, the great teaching of in the Dharma of no abode, There is no rejecting or grasping. So in that situation, in that teaching the dharma of no abode, which is the wisdom teaching for bodhisattvas, in that teaching, in that practice, no grasping or rejecting, including no grasping of what is Buddha and what's not Buddha, and no rejecting. of what is Buddha and not Buddha. Again, this is a wisdom teaching. And then someone says, well, but if there's no grasping and rejecting, won't that sort of melt all boundaries and borders? How could you have any boundaries with anybody if there's no grasping and rejecting?

[12:20]

And I said, as gifts. When you're not grasping and rejecting, boundaries are gifts. They don't disappear. The teaching of emptiness doesn't melt things. It sets them free. So before you, when you're grasping and rejecting, then you're all caught up and tangled and, you know, enslaved by boundaries. and borders and limits. But when you aren't grasping and rejecting them, they still come to you. If you're practicing wisdom, most people, even if they're practicing this kind of wisdom of not grasping and rejecting anything, if we take them into cold water, they'll feel a boundary.

[13:23]

They'll feel like, ooh, The body will say, uh-uh, no, this is like, don't go in there or get out of there. And it's very hot also. Like if you go into the plunges here, you think it's going to be 108, but you go in and it seems like it's more than 108. The body says, no, please, please, let's put a boundary up here. It's a gift to you. You don't have to be grasping anything to get that gift. And you can also give people the gift. Would you please stop that? I need you to do this. I need you to do that. But when you're not grasping or seeking, these are gifts that you give to people that are given to you. It's given to you that you want to give this gift. You're not trying to control anything. And you're just full of boundaries. Move the incense burner that way, please. And then they don't. You know, whatever.

[14:32]

But it's a wonderful, playful ritual to put the incense burner right there. It's a boundary, it's a border that's freely given and freely received with no grasping or seeking. This is the Dharma of no abode. This is the way we sit. Boundaries, borders, they're just lovely gifts that we are given and can pass on. Oh, I just got a boundary, I want to give it to you. And you say, I just got a boundary, I don't want to receive it. How wonderful. This is a practice for bodhisattvas, you know, grasping and seeking.

[15:37]

doesn't eliminate or melt anything. Well, it kind of melts suffering and hatred and delusion. So it's kind of risky of us to... Zen Center is... play a risky game because we chant the Heart Sutra and anybody can walk in off the street and hear that. Some of the people who hear it have not yet genuinely committed to the Bodhisattva Vavs. They hear that, they walk into Zen Zen and then they walk out and say, well, I guess I can just continue to be totally selfish. These Zen people totally support me. And you can find people like that in bars all over San Francisco. who have been to Zen Center a couple of times, and they've gotten reinforcement for not caring about anybody.

[16:44]

And they quote Zen texts as the reason why they don't. It's a sad thing. Eventually, however, they leave the bar and come back to Zen Center for further instruction. Next, there's two more sentences in the great teacher's instruction to the great teacher. The next one is kind of scary. It goes something like, if you're studying seated Buddha, this is killing Buddha. Tanahashi-sensei, and I think Norman Fisher helped him translate this.

[18:00]

They wrote it, you know, when you sit Buddha, you kill, and they have parentheses, go beyond, close parentheses, Buddha. I'll just soften that word, kill. Fine. Professor Bielefeld makes an interesting point. He said that when Dogen is commenting on this, he syntactically plays with sitting Buddha and killing Buddha. In the sentence, sitting Buddha is killing Buddha.

[19:04]

So the syntax is interesting because the subject of the sentence, Buddha, a seated Buddha, is the object of the predicate. The predicate is the part of a sentence that says something or expresses something about the subject. So in the sentence, Sitting Buddha is killing Buddha. Killing Buddha tells us something about sitting Buddha. And it tells us not only that sitting Buddha is killing Buddha, but Buddha is the object of the killing. So sitting Buddha naturally kills Buddha, which is very similar to sitting Buddha has no fixed mark.

[20:21]

It's kind of the same instruction. And Madsu's great-grandson and Nanyue's great-great-grandson, Lin Ji, is famous for saying, when you meet a Buddha, kill a Buddha. When you meet an ancestor, actually, you could say, when you meet a patriarch, kill a kid patriarch. But even if you meet an ancestor, a nice ancestor, kill the ancestor. Actually, when you meet anybody, if you're a bodhisattva, kill them. It means whoever you meet, remember, they have no fixed marks. You see marks. They have marks. But remember, they have no fixed marks. They are really no fixed marks. That's who they really are. Of course, the word killing here is not the ordinary meaning of killing.

[21:27]

But the ancestry said killing rather than go beyond. Go beyond is also true. When you meet Buddha, go beyond Buddha. Sitting Buddha is to go beyond Buddha. It's up to each of us whether we want to practice sitting Buddha or some other kind of sitting. This is an instruction from this ancestor to this ancestor because one of the ancestors said he was sitting to make a Buddha. That's what kind of sitting he was doing. So this is instruction for such a person. And doing that kind of practice, you're doing all the bodhisattva practices. You're practicing giving, ethical discipline, patience, enthusiasm, concentration, and wisdom. That's what you're doing. And you're doing that to practice sitting Buddha. And you understand that to practice sitting Buddha is to go beyond Buddha.

[22:34]

that Buddha is always, what Buddha is is constantly going beyond Buddha. In a way, the commentary here by Dogen Zenji on this teaching is very straightforward and it seems quite easy to understand, almost repetitive of the original statement, slightly changing it over and over. So in a way, I don't want to bother you with it, but in another way, it's maybe a nice thing to help this teaching sink in if I read his commentary. This means, this being seated Buddha is killing Buddha, this means that when we investigate further the notion of seated Buddha, we find it has the virtue of killing Buddha.

[24:00]

Yeah. So you look at seating Buddha, you say, oh... This seated Buddha has the virtue of killing Buddha. How interesting. At the very moment that we are seated Buddha, we are killing Buddha. At the very moment that we're seated Buddha, we go beyond Buddha. At the very moment we're totally seated Buddha. There's nobody in addition to seated Buddha. There's just seated Buddha. at our seat. At that moment, there is going beyond Buddha. It's the same, you could say, that the very moment you're seated, yourself is seated, at the moment you're really yourself seated, you go beyond yourself seated.

[25:08]

Indeed, when we pursue it, seated Buddha, we find that the marks and the signs and the radiance of killing Buddha are always a seated Buddha. Although the word kill here is identical with that used by ordinary people, its meaning is not the same. Moreover, we must investigate in what form it is that siddha Buddha, siddha Buddha, is killing Buddha. sets up the next sentence. Taking up the fact that it is itself a virtue of the Buddha to kill the Buddha, we should study whether we are killers or not.

[26:28]

So, Dogen, in looking at this teaching about... Zabutsu is Setsubutsu. Sitting Buddha is killing Buddha. And looking at this, he says that we should, we must investigate what form it is that seated Buddha is killing Buddha. So now we should look at the form of the ritual of seated Buddha that kills the Buddha. And that's the next sentence. But we have more time, so we don't have to go to the next sentence right now. We have a little bit more time here in this session, in this day, in this practice period.

[27:39]

In a way, I don't have to give this talk, but I'm doing it anyway. And I don't have to tell you, although I'm doing it anyway, that I heard a rumor that there's about seven more days in this practice period. Somebody told me that. And even before the person told me that, I thought that there's seven more days in this practice period. How precious. Seven more days. I said to someone, and each one of those days we might be able to take a hundred steps or more. Like 700 steps we could take in this valley. How great. Yeah, so please enjoy this precious time. now that you've settled down.

[28:53]

Please enjoy each step, each breath, each meeting with each thing and each being. Sitting Buddha has no fixed form. So no matter what's happening, it can be seating Buddha. Because it has no fixed form, it's difficult to avoid it. So whatever we're doing could be seated Buddha, could be going beyond Buddha, in this valley and beyond. How wonderful. How marvelous.

[30:05]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, Visit sfzc.org and click Given.

[30:37]

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